1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to system recovery.
2. Description of the Related Art
The term “workflow” may be used to describe tasks and data for business processes. The data, for example, may relate to organizations or people involved in a business process and required input and output information for the business process: A workflow automation product allows creation of a workflow model to manage business processes. A workflow engine is a component in a workflow automation program that understands the tasks of each business process in the workflow and determines whether the business process is ready to move to the next task.
An enterprise may be any organization (e.g., private company, government unit, etc.) that uses computers. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) may be used to describe techniques and tools aimed at consolidating and coordinating computer applications in an enterprise. Typically, an enterprise has existing legacy applications and data stores and wants to continue to use them while adding or migrating to a new set of applications. EAI may involve determining how existing applications and new applications will fit together.
Recovering a system, such as a server computer, after failure is a critical part of a software application. In some systems, a sequential log of work requests is maintained in a persistent data store, and, for recovery, the work requests in the log are re-executed to arrive at a consistent state. A work request may be described as a business object request because the work request is processed by a business process. For example, a work request may provide data (e.g., employee name and social security number) and a description of what is to be done (e.g., creating, deleting, or updating an entry in a data store).
In some systems, a system state is stored in a persistent data store, and recovery of a system is performed by reading the system state and completely re-initializing the system using the saved system state. During such recovery, the system is not available for other processing.
In some systems, such as workflow engines or EAI servers, where business processes run for a long period of time, it may not be feasible to implement a solution that re-executes all work requests in a log or that re-initializes system state from a stored system state as these recovery solutions may take too long to execute and may not make the system available as quickly as desired.
Thus, there is a need in the art for an improved recovery solutions.